Adjust Display Options on the Motorola Droid

Is your Motorola Droid display unnecessarily dim? Getting irritated with the screen going dark on you when you're just looking to check that e-mail? You're not alone. See how you can change your Droid's display settings and find a solution. Read on to learn more.

slide 1 of 5

One of the most appealing features of the Motorola Droid, apart from the slideout keyboard, is the fabulous 3.7 inch capacitive touchscreen. The 480x854 WXGA screen is very comfortable for webpage display and media content. As with most handheld devices, the display isn’t really helpful when using the device under direct sunlight. Motorola has included the ambient light sensing feature in the Motorola Droid. Theoretically the device should be capable of dimming and brightening up the display depending on the ambient lighting conditions, but that is far from the reality in at least some of these handsets.

slide 2 of 5

Modifying the Display Settings

If you are one of the these unfortunate souls experiencing trouble with the autodimming Motorola Droid display problem, the only way to fix this problem is to disable/adjust the auto display control. To get to this control select the settings icon.

Go to to Sound & Display.

From the Display settings select the brightness control, if you want to disable the autobrightness control, just uncheck the box.

slide 3 of 5

Autobrightness Control

The auto-brightness control is provided so that the display can be dimmed at locations where brightness is not required and hence battery charge may be conserved. When the setting is changed to disable the auto-brightness control there may be situations where the phone might consume more charge than it normally would. However, this kind of situation is not very prevalent and the battery charge tradeoff could be worth the pain it saves when you take out your phone for a quick e-mail or message and the display goes dark!

The Motorola Droid seems to detect the ambient light levels through a combination of the front facing camera and small sensor on the side, you can verify this by closing both these areas with your fingers and noticing that the screen brightness alters. You might try taking care not to obstruct both or either of these sensors and see if that improves the trouble with the screen dimming. You can also try tweaking the screen timeout control, to any comfortable value and check the performance.

Android App - there's an app for that!

If you feel that manually tweaking the settings each and every time is a pain in the neck, then you're not alone. There is an Android app called Setting Profiles Full, this app allows the phone to switch settings on the fly depending on the location or a preset rule. The Android app is capable of altering everything from ringtones to Bluetooth connectivity and even screen brightness settings. Say you are in the office during working hours (hopefully ;-) then you can set up a preset screen brightness setting for that situation and the phone will automatically change to that setting making things a bit easier. There are also complaints that this app is a bit buggy so give it a try and see if it's for you.

Hopefully, Motorola may be able to fix this problem via a software update so keep an eye out for a software update for your Droid.